Literacy scheme

Either I've missed another initiative from the UK or you've fallen through a time warp. There hasn't been a "new" Literacy Strategy since 1998, unless you're talking about the "Primary Framework", and even this is five years old. The new government is currently fannying around with curriculum consultation committees so who knows what claptrap they'll come up with.

Don't wait for the English government. You can ignore them anyway as you work in an international school. If there's a decent scheme out there, get it, but they'rel all far from perfect.

Are you teaching a class with a large number of EAL children? In my experience, children in KS1 and lower KS2 tend to struggle massively with age-appropriate literacy material from the UK if they are not native speakers. This is particularly the case with reading materials because of a lack of vocabulary and cultural differences. For example, I am going to give some of my Year 4 EAL children Year 1 spelling materials, and even the highest achieving non-native speakers in Year 4 can only handle Year 3 comprehension texts.

Hmmm, well I asked a similar question the other week. the Literacy strategy changed a few years ago (2006), and appears to now go under the term Primary Framework. Sadly sulla has indeed been in a time warp as the new framework is very different from the old one, without word or sentence guidelines and with some different genre in each year group. From my searches it appears that many teacher are still using the old strategy as a guide to support these text strands as otherwise a school may well not be covering the grammar needed.
Personally I hate it and feel it is useless as a planning tool.
Let us hope sulla is aware of how the numeracy strategy has also changed since it is very different with Blocks and Units allowing a sequenced learning throughout each year group, though it is difficult to locate a decent online link from the UK government which has the depth needed to support plannning. Hamilton Trust and most of the English counties have good websites that support both Numeracy and Literacy.

Thanks happygreenfrog, I'm glad to hear I'm not alone on this. The majority of my kids are working at their expected level, which is great given 95% of them are Spanish. My problem was that when I switched to the new framework they all froze up because they were all expected to speak in front of the class a lot more than before, even the British kids found it daunting. I then started to utilise older strategies within the new framework and the kids opened up again. I thought maybe a literacy scheme designed to work with the new framework would make it easier to integrate into the classroom. I didn't, though, want to invest in this if the strategy was likely to change in the near future either.